I think you underestimate the cleverness of people. I would say the number is definitely into the "hundreds." I bet many of the people that get caught bring attention to themselves. Like your squirrelly girl and this asshat.
d2xccoach wrote:
Chet Manly wrote:I'm curious on how prevalent cheating like this is. Do we think that there's only a handful of people that cheated to get their Boston qualifier? Or are there a few hundred? Or maybe even more?
I have been proofing the results for the marathon I work for since about 2000. We have about 2500 marathon finishers each year so that would be about 40,000 total over that span. I have DQ'd about 50 people, only 2 have challenged the DQ, plus we got Kipped which we didn't record as a DQ but I remain highly suspicious. To be fair, in about 50% of the DQ's the runners contacted me before I even had a chance to contact them to ask for an explanation. They saw their result on the preliminary results and got in touch to say they weren't actually a finisher. The way chips are so sensitive now if a DNF runner walks near the finish line mat sometimes they get checked in. That always makes me feel good when the runner contacts me first and wants to set the record straight.
Of the 2 DQ's that challenged me, one I had 2 missing chip splits (out of 7 we recorded that year). One of the missing splits happened to be an unannounced mat which we also had video on, and the other was a mat only about 1.5 miles away from the unannounced mat. I reviewed a pretty large chunk of video to try to find this runner and no one wearing what they were wearing is on the video. The runner originally though we only had the hung their argument on "my chip must have malfunctioned". But when given the opportunity to review the video with me to point themselves out they stopped corresponding to me.
The other DQ was in our early days using chips before we put out multiple chip mats. Back then we used to just do start, 13.1, finish. A friend of mine who was spectating just happened to notice a maybe runner acting squirrelly and brought it to my attention afterwards. What he saw...a tall blonde young woman with a visor, tank top, and black running pants (maybe capris, I don't remember exactly it was a long time ago, but I do remember it wasn't shorts) on a hot day. He was at the 25 mile mark or so and noticed her walking away from the finish line, then about 10 minutes later she passed him jogging towards the finish line. He said he and his wife both commented on her immediately when she was headed towards the finish line. He was on his bike, rode ahead to get her bib number, and told me afterwards. When I checked out her results she had like a 1:50 first half and a 1:22 second half, which would have been the 2nd fastest 2nd half of all the women marathoners that day. When I wrote to her to get her side of it she gave the typical "I just started feeling great" and "I don't use my watch for splits", that kind of stuff. And one of the things she said when it was clear that we weren't buying her story was "what about my Boston qualifier?" When I did some further research it looked to me like she had possibly cut the course at least twice previously (including only running 1 loop of a 2 loop Ironman course).
So, long answer to your question...in my experience I've caught 2 out of about 40,000 finishers at our race that had a BQ. Plus my suspicions regarding Kip. I may have missed a few, especially in the earlier years, but the systems we now have in place I haven't seen anything suspicious that we didn't pull out as a DQ since 2010. But I think a lot of marathons don't try as hard to police their results, so I suspect "how many runner cheat to get a BQ" would number in the dozens. I wouldn't say hundreds, maybe I'm wrong.